BiblioVault - Books about Women clergy

The Gendered Pulpit

Preaching in American Protestant Spaces

Roxanne Mountford

Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

In this feminist investigation into the art of preaching—one of the oldest and least studied rhetorical traditions—Roxanne Mountford explores the relationship between bodies, space, race, and gender in rhetorical performance and American Protestant culture. Refiguring delivery and physicality as significant components of the rhetorical situation, The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces examines the strategies of three contemporary women preachers who have transgressed traditions, rearranged rhetorical space, and conquered gender bias to establish greater intimacy with their congregations.

Mountford’s examinations of the rhetoric inherent in preaching manuals from 1850 to the present provide insight into how “manliness” has remained a central concept in American preaching since the mid-nineteenth century. The manuals illustrate that the character, style, method of delivery, and theological purpose of preachers focused on white men and their cultural standing, leaving contemporary women preachers searching for ways to accommodate themselves to the physicality of preaching.

Three case studies of women preachers who have succeeded or failed in rearranging rhetorical space provide the foundation for the volume. These contemporary examples have important implications for feminist theology and also reveal the importance of gender, space, and bodies to studies of rhetoric in general. Mountford explores the geographies of St. John’s Lutheran Church and the preaching of Rev. Patricia O’Connor who reformed rhetorical space through the delivery of her sermons. At Eastside United Church of Christ, Mountford shows, Rev. Barbara Hill employed narrative style and prophetic utterance in the tradition of black preaching to address gender bias and institute change in her congregation. The final case study details the experiences of Pastor Janet Moore and her struggles at Victory Hills United Methodist Church, where the fractured congregation could not be united even with Pastor Moore’s focus on theological purpose and invention strategies.

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Ordaining Women

Culture and Conflict in Religious Organizations

Mark Chaves

Harvard University Press, 1997

Why does a denomination prohibiting women clergy support parishes run by women? Why does a denomination opt to ordain women when there are few women seeking to join that clergy? And why have some denominations ordained women so much earlier than others? In a revealing examination of the complex relationship among religion, social forces, and organizational structure, Ordaining Women draws examples and data from over 100 Christian denominations to explore the meaning of institutional rules about women's ordination.

Combining historical and sociological perspectives, Mark Chaves deftly shows that formal institutional rules about ordination often diverge from the actual roles of women and are best understood as symbolic gestures in favor of--or in opposition to--gender equality. Ordaining Women concludes that external pressures from the women's movement and ecumenical pressure expressed through interdenominational organizations such as the National Council of Churches influence ordination practices. At the same time, internal factors such as having a source of religious authority that is considered superior to modern principles of equal rights also explain why some denominations ordain women much earlier than others.

Surprisingly, "the Bible forbids it" does not account for policies even among fundamentalists and other biblical inerrantists. Chaves' historical and comparative approach offers a revealing analysis of how the internal denominational debates have changed over time, becoming more frequent, more politicized, and more contentious. The skillful delineation of forces affecting debates and policies about women's ordination makes this book an important contribution to our understanding of religious organizations and of gender equality.

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The Reader's Repentance

Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse

Christine L. Krueger

University of Chicago Press, 1992

"A woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs," Dr. Johnson pronounced. "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." The prejudice embodied in this remark has persisted over time, impeding any proper assessment of the female preaching tradition and its role in shaping social and literary discourse. The Reader's Repentance recovers this tradition, and in doing so revises the history of nineteenth-century women's writing.

Christine L. Krueger persuasively argues that Evangelical Christianity, by assuming the spiritual equality of women and men and the moral superiority of middle-class women, opened a space for the linguistic empowerment of women and fostered the emergence of women orators and writers who, in complex and contradictory ways, became powerful public figures. In the light of unpublished or long out-of-print writing by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women preachers, Krueger shows how these women drew on religious language to critique forms of male domination, promote female political power, establish communities of women, and, most significantly, feminize social discourse. She traces the legacy of these preachers through the work of writers as diverse as Hannah More, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot—women who, despite political differences, shared an evangelical strategy for placing women's concerns on the social agenda of their time.

Documenting and analyzing the tradition of women's preaching as a powerful and distinctly feminist force in the development of nineteenth-century social fiction, The Reader's Repentance reconstitutes a significant chapter in the history of women and culture. This original work will be of interest to students of women's history, literature, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century society.

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